Liberals Are Digging Their Own Grave With Russiagate

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Professor Stephen CohenPhoto courtesy of New York Historical Society

“This new Cold War [is] more dangerous than the preceding Cold War,” Professor Stephen Cohen tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” Cohen, a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, has a new book out that addresses the possibility of a U.S.-Russia armed conflict in the near future. Part of the current rejection of the Kremlin that has brought the two nations to this dangerous brink, according to Cohen, is rooted in the U.S. political elites’ desire to maintain its ability to determine the world order. When Vladimir Putin was first elected, the professor explains, it became immediately obvious that he wanted Russia to take part in shaping “how the world is structured.”

“Since then, the sense that America doesn’t have a free hand any longer … but I don’t think our establishment has ever gotten used to this reality,” says Cohen. “And a lot of the catastrophes we see, including the wars, is a kind of Don Quixote tilting at these windmills with war, because the world’s not conforming to what Washington thinks it ought to be. Nor will it ever, any longer.”

Joining the two is Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, to discuss the neo-McCarthyism that has been unleashed by Russiagate and what the journalist calls “Trump derangement syndrome” that leads liberals to buy into hysteria surrounding Russia so long as it serves an anti-Trump agenda. While vanden Heuvel argues that the American left is making significant progress on domestic issues, even progressive leaders such as senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “have to some extent bought into this new Cold War.”

Highlighting the dangers of the current anti-Kremling hysteria, the journalist posits that in the upcoming general election, however, “you’re going to see people moving ideas forward on the foreign policy front that will not be Trumpian, but will be first principle of restraint, realism, anti-intervention, not policing the world, and understanding that endless war is a disaster.”

Listen to Cohen, vanden Heuvel and Scheer discuss in depth both the dangerous as well as hopeful paths the U.S. is headed down as it grapples with its domestic and foreign policy under the shadow of a new Cold War, during which “new [progressive] insurgencies” continue to make headway despite the American establishment’s firm grip on power and a wave of neo-McCarthyism threatens to censor dissent.